The AR Solution & Challenges
In an effort to increase brand awareness and keeping in mind the primary target audience (Facebook and Instagram followers), the GoPhygital team worked closely with the Meta & Adosphere teams to pitch a unique AR effect and publish it on the client’s Facebook & Instagram accounts. In addition, it was recommended that promoting the AR effect as an AR Ad using Facebook Ads would garner a larger viewing audience for the client’s social accounts.
Once the concept was approved by all parties involved (Meta India, Adosphere India, GoPhygital, and the client), the GoPhygital team started work on creating the AR effect.
The Concept
Taking inspiration from the products offered by the client, the GoPhygital team developed a unique concept where when the user launches the AR effect, they are transported to an ARt Gallery featuring exquisite paintings crafted by the client.
While in the ARt gallery, the user can interact with various icons featured in the AR effect. These icons include movement in the gallery, viewing textual descriptions of each painting, listening to audio descriptions of each painting, and also allowing the user to place each painting in their surroundings. With the addition of this unique feature, the user could see how the painting looked like on his/her wall, and if they liked it, they could head over to the client’s website to make a purchase.
The Challenges
While the concept was really interesting and GoPhygital was confident in creating an amazing Augmented Reality experience for the client, the project had its own set of challenges that the GoPhygital team had to resolve.
The first was optimizing all the assets (3D, 2D, and audio) to meet the file size limitation of less than 4 MB. This was a massive undertaking for the GoPhygital team because the painting assets (total 6) alone were above 6 MB each. After much effort and a lot of coffee, the team was able to substantially decrease the size of each painting, while at the same time, keeping quality the priority.
Another challenged the team faced was an unexpected error message when uploading the AR effect to Facebook Ads. The error message read “Facebook Ads doesn’t support the following capabilities used in your effect: realScaleEstimationWithFallback.”
After scouring the internet for a possible solution, and coming up with nothing, the GoPhygital team decided to do a deep dive into the unsupported capabilities. It was discovered that “Real World Scale” and “Fallback” were capabilities attached to the “plane tracker” feature in Spark AR. Since the AR effect does not have a plane tracker feature, the team was confused as to why these capabilities were added.
Eventually, the team was able to solve the problem by following these steps:
- Adding a plane tracker.
- Setting it for real scale.
- Checking the capability page to make sure the ‘real scale’ capability was now listed.
- Unchecking real scale on the plane tracker.
- Saving the project.
- Checking the capability page to make sure the ‘real scale’ capability was now unchecked.
- Deleting the plane tracker.
The Value Take-away
The GoPhygital team worked closely with the Meta India and Adosphere India teams to find the right approach and launched the AR effect that was aligned to the guidelines but more importantly had the right impact with the audiences to create curiosity and buzz around the client and the products they offer.
The AR effect can be view here: https://www.instagram.com/ar/1117945132317656
Thanks to the immersive nature of Augmented Reality, brands and organizations globally are looking to leverage the power of AR for enhancing their customer engagement program.
If you are a brand or a business wanting to explore how AR or VR can help you, write to us on iwantto@gophygital.io and we would be happy to craft the right solution for you.